Conference of the Birds by Faridudin Attar

THE CONFERENCE OF THE BIRDS Farid ud-din Attar Translated by Afham Darbandi and Dick Davis London: Penguin, 1984 (~1177) INTRODUCTION [A biographical index follows the poem – KA] The Conference of the Birds (Manteq at-Tair) is the best-known work of Farid ud-Din Attar, a Persian poet who was born at some time during the twelfth century in Neishapour (where Omar Khayyam had also been born), in north-east Iran, and died in the same city early in the thirteenth century. His name, Attar, is a form of the word from which we get the ‘attar’ of ‘attar of roses’ and it indicates a perfume seller or druggist. Attar wrote that he composed his poems in his daru-khané, a word which in modern Persian means a chemist’s shop or drug-store, but which has suggestions of a dispensary or even a doctor’s surgery; and it is probable that he combined the selling of drugs and perfumes with the practice of medicine. His date of birth is given by different authorities at various times between 1120 and 1157; modern writers have inclined towards the earlier date. Two manuscript copies of The Conference of the Birds give the date of its completion as 1177, and on internal evidence one would judge it to be the work of a writer well past his youth; this also suggests that a birth-date closer to 1120 than 1157 is likely. He is said to have spent much of his childhood being educated at the theological school attached to the shrine of Imam Reza at Mashhad (the largest town in north-eastern Iran and a major centre of pilgrimage), and later to have travelled to Rey (the ancient Raghes, near modern Tehran), Egypt, Damascus, Mecca, Turkistan (southern Russia) and India. Such itineraries are common in the lives of Persian poets of this period, and it was clearly usual for them, like their counterparts in medieval Europe, the troubadours and wandering scholars, to travel from place to place in search of knowledge or patronage or both. Attar’s travels seem to have been undertaken more in the pursuit of knowledge than patronage; he boasted that he had never sought a king’s favour or stooped to writing a panegyric (this alone would make him worthy of note among Persian poets). Though The Conference of the Birds is about the search for an idea, spiritual king, Attar obviously had a low opinion of most earthly rulers; he usually presents their behaviour as capricious and cruel, and at one point in the poem he specifically says it is best to have nothing to do with them. The knowledge he particularly sought was concerned with the biographies and sayings of Islamic saints; these he collected together in his prose work Tadhkirat al-Auliya (Memorials of the Saints), which became an important source book for later hagiographers. After his wanderings he settled in his home town, where he presumably kept his daru-khané. There is some evidence that late in his life he was tried for heresy -- reading The Conference of the Birds it is not difficult to see why, though the accusation was made against a different poem. The charge was upheld, Attar was banished and his property was looted. Edward G. Browne (A Literary History of Persia, 1906; Cambridge, 1928 version, Vol. 2, p.509) points out that this was a not uncommon fate for Persian mystical poets to endure, and that in his last book, Lisanu’l Ghaib [lit. “A voice from heaven, a revelation, an oracle; the mystic tongue”, compare Frank Herbert’s “Lisan al-Gaib”, the voice from the outer world, in “Dune” – KA], Attar Quote: compares himself to Nasir-e-Khosrow, who, like himself, “in order that he might not look on the accursed faces” of his persecutors, retired from the world and “hid himself like a ruby in Badakhshan.” The Conference of the Birds contains many anecdotes about sufis who suffered for their beliefs; and if Attar was attacked for his writings, the experience surely cannot have been a surprise to him. However, he was back in Neishapour at the time of his death, which is variously given as having occurred between 1193 and 1235. One of the dates most favoured among early writers is 1229, the year of the Mongols’ sack of Neishapour during their devastating sweep westwards, which took them to Baghdad and beyond. If Attar was born around 1120 he would have been well over a hundred years old at this time, and it seems more likely that his biographers have been seduced by the pathetic picture of the saintly old poet butchered by the barbarian hordes than that he actually did live so long. A date shortly before 1220 is more probably, though even this would mean that he was in his nineties when he died. A memorial stone was erected over Attar’s tomb in the late fifteenth century, and the site is still maintained as a minor shrine. (The tombs of Persian mystical poets have commonly become shrines; Ansari’s tomb in Heart was once a magnificently adorned place of pilgrimage -- it still exists in a more or less dilapidated state -- and Rumi’s tomb at Konya is to this day maintained in lavish splendour.) Both Attar’s tomb and Omar Khayyam’s were restored in the 1930s -- Attar’s with rather more discretion than Khayyam’s; the building that now houses the tomb is surrounded by a small garden. The Conference of the Birds is a poem about sufism, the doctrine propounded by the mystics of Islam, and it is necessary to know something about this doctrine if the poem is to be fully appreciated. Sufism was an esoteric system, partly because it was continually accused of being heretical, partly because it was held to be incomprehensible and dangerous if expounded to those who had not received the necessary spiritual training. It was handed down within orders of adepts, who were forbidden to reveal the most important tenets of belief (although some occasionally did), from sheikh to pupil (throughout The Conference of the Birds the word “sheikh” denotes a spiritual leader, not a secular chief). Different sufis living at different times have clearly believed different things, and most sufi authors tend to retreat into paradox at crucial moments, either because they feel their beliefs are genuinely inexpressible by other means or because they fear orthodox reprisal. The doctrine is elusive, but certain tenets emerge as common to most accounts. These, briefly, are: only God truly exists, all other things are an emanation of Him, or are His “shadow”; religion is useful mainly as a way of reaching to a Truth beyond the teachings of particular religions -- however, some faiths are more useful for this than others, and Islam is the most useful; man’s distinctions between good and evil have no meaning for God, who knows only Unity; the soul is trapped within the cage of the body but can, by looking inward, recognize its essential affinity with God; the awakened soul, guided by God’s grace, can progress along a “Way” which leads to annihilation in God. The doctrine received its most extreme expression in the writings of the Spanish Arab pantheist Ibn Arabi, a contemporary of Attar, who maintained that the being of creation and the Creator are invisible. In The Conference of the Birds Attar frequently seems about to propound the same doctrine, only to step back at the last moment and maintain a final distinction between God and His creatures. Attar’s own connection with sufism is not entirely clear. It is not possible, for example, to identify incontrovertibly the sheikh from whom he received instruction, or even to state with certainty which order he belonged to. J. Spencer Trimmingham, in his excellent book The Sufi Orders in Islam (Oxford, 1971), says that his sheikh was Majd ad-Din al- Baghdadi (died 1219) of the Kubrawiya order; however, E. G. Browne quotes a Persian source to the effect that though Majd ad-Din was Attar’s teacher it was medicine that he taught him, not the Way of sufism. There is another persistent tradition (first mentioned by Rumi, whom Attar is said to have dandled on his knee as a child and whose poetry is considered by Persians to be the ne plus ultra of mystical literature) that Attar had in fact no teacher and was instructed in the Way by the spirit of Mansur al-Hallaj, the sufi martyr who had been executed in Baghdad in 922 and who appeared to him in a dream. The two traditions are not wholly exclusive; Attar may have belonged to an order and have had a confirmatory dream in which Hallaj appeared to him. His collection of sayings and anecdotes connected with the lives of sufi saints, Memorials of the Saints (many such anecdotes also appear in The Conference of the Birds), suggests a bookish, rather scholarly man interested in the lives of those who had gone before him. My own guess -- it is no more than that -- is that the tradition of his instruction by the spirit of Hallaj is a dramatic symbol of his scholarly preoccupation with the lives of dead sufis. Attar shows a particular interest in the lives of two sufis, al-Hallaj and Bistami (or “Bayazid”, as Attar calls him). Both, significantly enough, were representatives of the more extreme, antinomian and, to many of the orthodox, scandalous tendencies of sufism. Hallaj was a Persian who wrote in Arabic (Arabic occupied the position in Islamic Asia and Africa that Latin held in medieval Christian Europe, and many authors used it in preference to their own vernacular languages).

Load more